On 29 December at 14:00 Tõnis Eerme will defend his doctoral thesis “Big Science as innovation intermediaries – micro- and meso-level effects from the collaboration with the European Space Agency” for obtaining the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (in Economics).
Supervisors:
professor Jüri Sepp, University of Tartu
professor Niina Mariia Nummela, University of Turku (Finland), University of Tartu
Opponents:
Laurent Bach, University of Strasbourg (France)
Tarmo Kalvet, Tallinn University of Technology
Summary
From the second half of the 20th century, Big Science centres, such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the European Space Agency (ESA), have become crucial for the advancement of scientific research. Big Science organisations stand out in terms of the unique size of their facilities and the complexity or duration of their experiments, which require long-term governmental commitment, often through international co-operation.
Big Science member states confront the challenge to measure various firm (micro) and industry (meso) level effects from the membership in order to better manage the national contributions to Big Science. This thesis aims at adding to current knowledge on various micro- and meso-level effects from collaboration with Big Science. The thesis is based on three original research papers that study different aspects related to micro- and meso-level effects from collaboration with Big Science. The empirical context of the study is ESA.
Big Science is a specific knowledge generation locus in the economy. Big Science is a systemic innovation intermediary that has multiple roles in order to address a range of theory-based market, systemic, and transformational failures. The articulation of demand for creating markets – highlighted in this thesis – is one of the roles that has received less attention in earlier literature.
The current evaluation practice tends to rely on the micro-level output additionality concept for measuring the effects of Big Science. The thesis points at various methodological and data quality issues that undermine the credibility of such evaluations. Also, the thesis describes the roles of Big Science in the internationalisation process of knowledge-intensive resource-constrained firms and in institutional change, which accompanies market formation processes. The findings of the study call for a more widespread use of micro- and meso-level behavioural additionality in the evaluations of Big Science membership.
Please note, the defence will be held in Microsoft Teams.